I’ve never heard of that. That sounds like a phenomenal idea. Mind If I use it for my own purposes?

I don't care if you steal it, since I stole it from the moderators of a science fiction forum back in the day.

It's actually quite a clever moderating technique since it's been scientifically proven that it's still possible to interpret the meaning of words even if all the vowels are removed. So, if you really want to read a troll's posts you can do so.

In my day job I have to upload my work to a perforce server in Sweden. So I have had weeks and weeks of dealing with the IT department. Which is final and undeniable truth of Karl Marx's theory "The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. "

At first they insisted I used a VPN. This VPN uses Microsoft MFA. So it times out every 4 hours. Right in the middle of any upload.Then they insisted they need to build me a new machine and install a tunnel in it. So I re-organised my office to make space for it. Bought £500 of kit so I could actually use it as the machine they sent was useless. Started uploading and got SSL timeouts every 6 hours.So I split my single changelist into 40 changelists and started uploading them. One by one. One changelist failed to upload. Looked at it.

The muppet in Stockholm had put the perforce repo in "E:\Program Files\Perforce\Repositories"

That brought up yells of WTF from the two experienced games coders in the company.

E: Has he put windows on drive E:????? ... but .... why ....

Perforce repos are normally something like "E:\Dev" because of 1 really important reason. MAXPATH

Indeed I cannot upload my final change list as the path to the file now exceeds MAXPATH.

Today it got worse as the guy in Stockholm I had been dealing with has moved on to something else and I now have to educate another IT muppet. This one reminds me of the cookie monster. Sigh.

Anyway it gave me some time to work on my game.

Which brought in a whole new set of muppets.

The terrain system is based on latitude and longitude so I need routines to convert from latitude longitude to an earth centric coordinate system. Luckily there is a free library I can use. So I plugged it in and roughed out a terrain manager.

Didn't work. Found the coordinate transformation didn't work. A longitude of 1.1 produced the same coordinate as 1.0. So all my terrain patches were packed into the same space. Sigh

So instead I did the mathematically correct conversion using the WGS84 defined ellipsoid. Too slow. Frame rate dropped to nothing. Sigh.

So I hacked something in based on a crude approximation and it works.

So I quickly added a deep ocean shader a friend gave to me , and ..... it's crap

As a former low-level IT muppet, I'm all too aware of the tendency for high-level "tech support" people to try to cram new problems into existing IT infrastructures, often creating all sorts of stupidity and delays as a result, rather than trying to figure how to most easily and logically resolve the problem with minimal fuss to the user.

At a mass level, low levels users might need that sort of control and management, and the organization's IT systems might benefit as a result, but for power users the only logical solution is to sit down, shut up, listen closely, give them what they need, and get the hell out of the way.

Given all the BS you've had to deal with, it seems simpler, faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone, to ship a carefully-packed portable hard via overnight courier.

Actually, it looks pretty good, so very good work as a start. Not quite photoreal, but subtly "impressionist".

The main problem is the lack of sufficient parallax with the sun glare on water effect which spoils the illusion of distance and depth of field. That and the fact that the width of the glare pattern is based on the width of sun's core + corona rather than just the core. You only get the broader core + corona glare pattern when the sun has gone low enough that you get a greater level of diffusion from the atmosphere (and/or haze/dust/smoke/whatever, if you plan to model it).

The main problem is the lack of sufficient parallax with the sun glare on water effect which spoils the illusion of distance and depth of field. That and the fact that the width of the glare pattern is based on the width of sun's core + corona rather than just the core. You only get the broader core + corona glare pattern when the sun has gone low enough that you get a greater level of diffusion from the atmosphere (and/or haze/dust/smoke/whatever, if you plan to model it).

Yes it needs more work, at the moment it's just specular and reflection. I have much bigger problems to solve at the moment.

I have solved the propeller issue..

The damn thing was getting renderered on the wrong render pass

But I have a big problem with my environment mapping. One view direction constantly glitches. It goes from this nice view ....

To this fecked up one...

Totally randomly. About 15 times a second.

It's doing my head in.

I have tried everything I can think of, but if I run the game in RenderDoc.... the problem goes away. I have looked through the code with a fine tooth comb, nothing.

Every time I put debug code in to try and track it down... it goes away.

The picture doesn't look too unrealistic if you assume that the sun has just set "behind" the observer's point of view while still illuminating objects at altitude, and if you assume that there is some massive source of light pollution and haze is creating airglow effects just over the horizon. (e.g., Sunset while the formation is flying just off the coast of modern Los Angeles).

You can also get diffuse light from airglow, haze, etc. when the sun is just below the horizon after sunset or sunrise. At extreme latitudes, you can still have twilight throughout the night near the summer/winter solstice due to the "white night" phenomena. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_brightness)

If you want to model airglow effects, they will be more visible to observers at high altitudes, since they are able to get a better viewing angle to see long distances through the earth's atmosphere, creating spectacular "corona" type effects which show the atmosphere's limits (e.g., any video of sunrise over earth from the ISS or similar spacecraft). The higher the altitude, the more obvious the airglow effect and the greater the "red to blue" shift from the sun's position on the horizon to the edge of the Earth's atmospheres, but they only really become really obvious above ~10k m ASL. (e.g., ).

If you wanted to be really fancy with the airglow effects, you could have actual Rayleigh Scattering effects from any large and intense source of light and/or haze, including light pollution from modern metro areas or massive fires like the recent California wildfires or a 1945 Dresden- or Tokyo-style firestorm. Among other things, that would automatically give you big "blood moons" in environments where the moon is close to the Earth's horizon and there are high levels of particulates in the upper atmosphere, give a brownish or reddish cast to the skies over smoggy or extremely dusty areas, and would reduce visible starlight in areas with high levels of light pollution and haze.